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This post will cover how to increase the disk space for a VMware virtual machine running Linux that is using logical volume manager (LVM). Firstly we will add a new disk to the virtual machine and then extend the original LVM over this additional space. Basically we will have two physical disks but just one volume group and one logical group that is using the space on both disks together. With this method there is no down time for the virtual machine.

As there are a number of different ways to increase disk space I have also posted some different methods here:

Important Notes: Be very careful when working with the commands in this article as they have the potential to cause a lot of damage to your data. If you are working with virtual machines make sure you take a snapshot of your virtual machine beforehand, or otherwise have some other form of up to date backup before proceeding. It could also be worth cloning the virtual machine first and testing out this method on the clone.

Throughout my examples I will be working with a VMware virtual machine running Debian 6, this was set up with a 20gb disk and we will be adding a new 20gb disk for a total LVM size of 40gb.

Although my examples make use of virtual machines, this method would work with a physical server as well if you have added a new physical disk in and want to use that to expand the LVM.

Identifying the partition type

As this method focuses on working with LVM, we will first confirm that our partition type is actually Linux LVM by running the below command.

fdisk -

As you can see in the above image /dev/sda5 is listed as “Linux LVM” and it has the ID of 8e. The 8e hex code shows that it is a Linux LVM, while 83 shows a Linux native partition. Now that we have confirmed we are working with an LVM we can continue.

Below is the disk information showing that our initial setup only has the one 20gb disk currently, which is under the logical volume named /dev/mapper/Mega-root – this is what we will be expanding with the new disk.

Note that /dev/mapper/Mega-root is the volume made up from /dev/sda5 currently – this is what we will be expanding.

Adding a new virtual hard disk

First off we add a new disk to the virtual machine. This is done by right clicking the virtual machine in vSphere, selecting edit settings and then clicking the “Add…” button which is used to add hardware to the virtual machine.

Select hard disk and click next.

Select create a new virtual disk and click next.

Select the disk size you want to add, I will be using 20gb as previously mentioned. I have also selected to store the disk with the virtual machine, it will store on the same datastore as the virtual machines files, this will be fine for my test purposes. Click next once complete.

Select next on the advanced options page.

Review everything and click finish once you have confirmed the settings.

You will then see the new disk under the hardware devices tab and it will be labelled with (adding) which means it will not apply until you click OK, so click OK to complete the process.

Detect the new disk space

In my test for this example, as soon as I added the additional disk in through VMware it displayed through “fdisk -l” for me, you can see the second disk labelled /dev/sdb (I have cropped out the information on /dev/sda1 to make it less cluttered here). It is also worth noting that it shows as not containing a valid partition table, we are about to set this up.

This may not however be the case for you, to avoid reboot you may need to rescan your devices, you can try this with the below command. Note that you may need to change host0 depending on your setup.

echo "- - -" > /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/scan

If you have issues detecting the new disk, just perform a reboot and it should then display correctly.

Partition the new disk

We now need to partition the new /dev/sdb disk so that it can be used, this is done by using fdisk.

fdisk /dev/sdb

This should provide us with the below prompt, the inputs I have entered in are shown in bold.

‘n’ was selected for adding a new partition.

root@Mega:~# fdisk /dev/sdb
Command (m for help): n

‘p’ is then selected as we are making a primary partition.

Command action
e extended
p primary partition (1-4)
p

As this is a new disk, we do not yet have any partitions on it so we will use partition 1 here.

Partition number (1-4): 1

Next we press the enter key twice, as by default the first and last cylinders of the unallocated space should be correct.

Now we need to confirm the name of the current volume group using the vgdisplay command. The name will vary depending on your setup, for me it is the name of my test server. vgdisplay provides plenty of information on the volume group, I have only shown the name and the current size of it for this example.

Next we need to increase the logical volume with the lvextend command (rather than the physical volume which we have already done). This means we will be taking our original logical volume and extending it over our new disk/partition/physical volume of /dev/sdb1.

Firstly confirm the name of the logical volume using lvdisplay. The name will vary depending on your setup.

If you like you can then run vgdisplay and lvdisplay again to confirm the size of the volume group and logical volume respectively, I have done this and I now have the following.

LV Size 38.90 GiB
VG Size 39.75 GiB

However if you run a “df” command to see available disk space it will not have changed yet as there is one final step, we need to resize the file system using the resize2fs command in order to make use of this space.